The Ontic Connected Intelligence Podcast

As a Special Agent, McKenzie was assigned to several high-profile investigations including the September 11th investigation, and the Amerithrax case. He also successfully investigated numerous Bank, Wire and Health Care fraud as well as Money Laundering cases which exposed critical flaws in banking systems.

Key topics of McKenzie’s discussion with host Chuck Randolph include:

• Why the desire to solve problems is at the heart of every skilled investigator
• Skills he learned as a Special Agent in the FBI that carried over into the private sector
• The role of relationships and building networks in his work and why it’s important to surround yourself with people who challenge you

Key takeaways:

05:50: Kurt McKenzie: I looked at investigations with the same obsessive compulsive behavior that I had when I was a scientist — I'm not being funny about that. It's when you work DNA analysis — the thing you understand is that you're dealing with crime at a molecular level.

06:07: Kurt McKenzie: You cannot make mistakes because when the Dna results come back, somebody could go to jail or potentially be executed because these are all very serious crimes. So you learn a meticulous approach to your job that you will take with you forever.

08:41: Kurt McKenzie: You don't want to surround yourself with yes men or like-minded people — you want to surround yourself with people who will tell you ‘hey you're screwing up’ or ‘hey, let's do this together hey you're on the right track’ or ‘hey, have you thought about this.’

09:00: Chuck Randolph: Yeah I love that too because we can get caught up in our own echo chamber and before we know it.

10:11: Chuck Randolph: Kurt you were in the bureau for over 24 years and you did everything — financial crimes, narcotics, trafficking, terrorism, organized crime. This meticulous obsession on critical thinking as a cornerstone to your to your job — did you have to pause and consider how am I going to approach this problem?

10:59: Kurt McKenzie: The first thing is to learn what you don't know, and the second thing is to apply basic investigative techniques that the FBI teaches you. You don't want to break the law trying to stop somebody from breaking the law, so you have to educate yourself. Not only about the law but about the group that you're looking at and the people you're looking at. You need to learn everything about them, learn who their associates are, and learn how they move money.

17:59: Kurt McKenzie: The two key takeaways that I developed over the years of building liaisons and building teams is that you have to take yourself down a peg at times. Because you may need somebody else more than they need you, so you need to be willing to compromise to an extent to get their cooperation.

The second thing you have to be able to make friends, and I don't mean to be fake. I had at least one friend in almost every police department and every federal agency in South Florida that I could call on to assist and I prided myself on that.

Key topics of Lake’s discussion with host Chuck Randolph include:

• Lessons in risk management Lake has learned that translate between his government and private sector experience.
• The importance of knowing your business and where security can add value to better support strategy and decision-making.
• Decision-making in times of crisis and the importance of knowing who has the authority to make certain decisions before an event occurs.

Key takeaways:

06:57: Chuck Randolph: How did you translate or how would you recommend people translating the ability to say ‘hey, here's some tenets that we have from say being in the military into the private with corporate world.’

07:45: Dick Lake: I would push back just a little on you Chuck when you said you kind of have it handed to you in the military. That's not always the case. What I had to do in the military is similar to what I had to do in the corporate world which is sell my product. Convince people that I had a product that was worth using and why it was in their interest and to their benefit to use that product.

12:45: Dick Lake: Part of it is what's my value proposition to the organization and one of the key ways you establish your value is you have an in-depth understanding of the business of the business and look for it look to identify ways that you can contribute.

21:50: Dick Lake: It’s critical to understand what the organization's crisis management, crisis response, and business continuity policies and procedures are. Most organizations will have somebody that has been identified that will have that role. The second thing is understanding who has the decision authority for certain things and who can make a decision to close an office.

That's something you need to decide before there's a crisis because a crisis is business that is not normal. So as as a chief security officer, I may not have that authority to close the office but I might be able to make a recommendation to the chief operating officer. People need to understand that — not just the chief operating officer and the chief security officer, but the chief financial officer, the CEO — everyone needs to underst

As a fourth generation Chicago Police officer (and first female), Chief Mary Eileen Paradis had the instinct to protect ingrained in her life early on. Despite the complex task of protecting 10,000 employees in a high-crime urban area like Jackson, Mississippi, her unwavering dedication and energy toward her role are just some of the qualities that have propelled her to excel in her career.

Key topics of Chief Paradis’ discussion with host Dr. Marisa Randazzo include:

• The challenges she faces amidst the growing reports of workplace violence in the healthcare sector generally and how she takes care of her team.
• Addressing the complexities of both the university and healthcare side of her role and the importance of relationships with local police and other areas on campus.
• Advice for women/girls pursuing a career in protection and her involvement in NAWLEE (National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives).

Chief Paradis possesses a combination of 30 plus years of law enforcement, higher education public safety and emergency management experience. She currently serves as the Chief of Police and the Executive Director of Public Safety for the University of Mississippi Police Department and the Office of Public Safety. In addition to higher education, Chief Paradis has worked in museums, hospitality, and retail, and was a sworn member of the Chicago Police Department’s Intelligence Section for over 11 years. Follow her on LinkedIn

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William Villanova knows this all too well, as he has been managing events of this nature for over three decades. He is the President of Frank E. Campbell – The Funeral Chapel in New York City, which has a rich history and is arguably the most well-known funeral home in Manhattan, if not the Nation. He is well known for implementing and promoting the highest standards in funeral service, of which security and privacy are paramount to a successful event. 

Key topics of Villanova’s discussion with host Fred Burton include:

• The preparation and contingency planning that goes into a celebrity funeral in the days/weeks leading up to the event.
• The variety of teams involved to orchastrate a high profile funeral – from NYPD to multiple private security teams to Secret Service.
• The extent of contingency planning, represented by the collaboration between medical teams and local hospitals on standby.

Ryan Schonfeld’s pushback to age-old security processes and refusing to settle for the way it’s always been done has helped him enable security teams to position their department as a business enabler, while protecting people and assets.

Key topics of Schonfeld’s discussion with host Chuck Randolph include:

• Why security teams need to understand the needs of the business and how their work can impact the success of the company.
• The cultural challenge of security viewing technology as a risk, instead of a force multiplier that enhances the irreplaceable value of human intel.
• Trends he's observing in the physical security industry and what’s on the horizon.

Key takeaways:

Ryan Schonfeld: It’s pretty incredible the amount of data that's out there. I think people, by and large, are more aware of the data today than they certainly were back in the early days of social media and smart devices, and as connected homes were becoming more relevant, and just more and more electronics becoming a part of everyday life. But one of the pieces in slow industries, like physical security, is lack of data isn't the issue, and it's really never been the issue. It's how data is effectively collected and operationalized. That's always what slowed things down.

Chuck Randolph: It strikes me, you're talking as much about change management and cultural change as you are operational change. Or, as you said, "Operationalizing the way that we manage the data." I think about it again, we have all these massive bureaucracies, whether it's the military, law enforcement, big corporation, or security provider, you're dealing with a lineage of culture change. You're going to walk in and say, "Hey, we're going to help you manage. We need to look and manage data in different ways." What obstacles have you come up with in your career to change management?

Ryan Schonfeld: I think fear of the unknown's probably the biggest one. As a former cop myself, there's a lot of people in our space that are maybe great security leaders, but don't have deep technology backgrounds. Sometimes, rather than surrounding themselves with domain experts, and people who can help understand the technology, and how that technology can be leveraged to improve the program, that technology starts getting seen as a risk to their job, to their program, to whatever it is that they've been building over time, when in fact it really should be a force multiplier.

I'm not a person that thinks that AI or technology is going to get rid of all the people in security, that's not possible. I think technology has a really important place in our space, but security is always going to require a human to understand context, and understand nuance, and ultimately make a decision that could impact whether or not somebody's life is harmed or protected, or what happens to a brand. That's not something that organizations are going to entrust to AI or a model. But that person who ultimately needs to make the decision needs to be equipped with the best information as quickly as possible, and that's where technology becomes that force multiplier. By embracing that, you have the ability to look great. It's not a risk to your program or to your job.

Chuck Randolph: Ryan, what you're really talking about is making the security function accessible to everybody, right?

Ryan Schonfeld: Yeah. I think as security people, and ex-cops, and ex-feds, and ex-military, we tend to operate in silos, we tend to keep things close to us in terms of what we're doing, and what our programs are, and what's entailed, and we do a very bad job of marketing security to the organization and letting people know what's actually going on.

Because the reality is, as you start marketing your initiatives, security's going to have different visibility within the organization, people are going to find more value, other departments are going to find more value. You might find a bigger budget in terms of cross department budgeting, if you can provide actual tangible value to other departments. As I alluded to earlier too, security leaders are really going to be seen more as thought leaders and business leaders with a seat at the table.

Bill Marlow is an internationally recognized authority on Information Security and Risk. As an active participant in critical infrastructure protection on a worldwide basis, he has worked closely with global governments and law enforcement as well as financial institutions, energy corporations, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies on issues involving cyber terrorism, security plans, and international cooperation. Additionally, Marlow has served his country as a member of the Intelligence Community.

Key topics of Marlow’s discussion with host Fred Burton include:

• The critical security need behind protecting publicly accessible location data for executives and their corporations, as well as individuals who are deployed abroad.
• The technology and strategy that went into creating the Qphone and the importance of the right customer base for this product.
• What’s next in the world of privacy and protection.

Key takeaways:

01:19: Bill Marlow: My team and I have been looking at things to help the good guys. The bad guys have the highest end capabilities that you can imagine - spectrum radios, point to point encryption capabilities - the good guys on the other hand are not exactly well funded. 

The Qphone is an ultra secure communications app that you can put on virtually any mobile device to allow fully secured, fully protected communications. The critical part is that we collect no data. We don't know where you are. We don't care where you are. We don't know what your phone is. It is truly a clean implementation. The encryption we use is a Quantum resistant encryption using the latest techniques to prevent Quantum computers from actually accessing it.

02:46 Fred: Wow, that's simply amazing. Now I think most of us who have lived in the intelligence space or the protection business are used to apps such as Signal or Whatsapp and so forth. How is Q phone different?

03:04 Bill Marlow: So nothing in life is free as the old adage goes. As you’re using a free app they have to pay for themselves somehow. So what they do is they collect information or metadata on every individual and then correlate that information and sell it lots of places. More importantly, there are a number of agencies around the world from different governments who buy that information through third party companies. They collect things about where you are, what kind of device you have, who you are connected to and how many times you talk to them, so on. 

The Qphone, on the other hand, doesn't collect anything. Now, it's not free but we don't collect anything so you're protected from that kind of analysis from going on. To most of us who are in the intelligence business or even the law enforcement business, that's a critical item - not having people be able to tell where you are who you're talking to or what you've done.

13:51 Fred: And I assume ah like most businesses do there's due diligence on customers to make sure that this technology is not falling into enemy's hands so to speak.

14:02 Bill Marlow: Absolutely. In fact, that's one of the critical items for us is that you have to be a recognizable organization. You have to be a corporation. You have to be a law enforcement group.

17:46 Fred: When you think through this having done a lot of threat assessments and vulnerability assessments on ultra high net worth individuals and so forth, you might have a CEO that's very secure but family members and children aren't.

18:01 Bill Marlow: Exactly and they're the vulnerability.

18:04.75 Fred: So in this space with a Qphone if you had this deployed amongst your core family and so forth. You could rest assured that nobody's tracking you monitoring you and triangulating in on your location.

19:23.56 Bill Marlow:  I think that more people need to be made aware of all the things that are happening to them in a privacy mode. How much information is being gathered about them people don't realize the extent of the information that is being gathered every time they go out to a news site or they go shopping online or and they don't have the right kinds of protections in place.

19:58 Bill Marlow: Qphone is one piece of a security program. We can protect their communications. We can make sure that they can send documents and messages and they can have conference calls and video calls securely. It works on your your mobile devices. It works on your desktop. But that’s a piece of a much larger program. There’s a need for people to start understanding about the amount of information that's being taken from them.

Briggs is a leading expert on security and has advised governments and multinational corporations on security, resilience, terrorism, and responses to extremism. She conducts research, thought leadership, and consulting for corporate clients on security and cybersecurity. She is also an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. She was awarded an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen in 2014 for services to hostage families and kidnap victims overseas.

Briggs and host Dr. Marisa Randazzo discuss:

• Why great ideas can change the world and how the Clarity Factory helps identify new insights and drive innovation in the corporate security and cybersecurity industry.
• Her process of conveying research to leaders around an organization and the important exercise of always coming back to the core argument.
• The undeniable connection between diversity and innovation in the security industry and what gives her hope that change is possible in the near future.

Key Takeaways:

02:50: Rachel Briggs: Any area or profession needs to have good ideas to be able to continually change and improve and face the increasing challenges that we face in the world. But great ideas change the world. (Of course if they are grounded in reality.)

06:31: Rachel Briggs: I think the simpler you can keep your ideas, without dumbing them down of course, the further they can travel and the better able people are able to implement it. That's why it's about clarity for me, it's about taking the messy old world that we all live in today and you know.

06:58: Marisa Randazzo: One of the things that has really impressed me about the work that you have done has been not only the clarity of the ideas but of how you communicate those ideas and especially for a corporate security audience or a c-suite audience. 

One of the things that has been so powerful in the work that you have done has been the succinctness and simplicity with which you have conveyed these ideas. It's not just the idea itself. I'd love to just hear about the process of how you go from kind of that raw data to really. Deriving the insights that that you do and then how you communicate it.

08:07: Rachel Briggs:  I'm a really big believer in trusting the process. You start by opening the funnel and you know what your initial question is and you keep that really simple and you then open it up and gather as much data and information as you possibly can. At a certain point in time you have to stop and go back down the funnel in the other direction and really get sharp on what the argument is — just try and write what it is. I force myself to get back to one piece of paper and find a way of really describing what it is I think this is telling me in a very succinct way before I start writing.

I think having that discipline really helps you to write and to communicate in a way that is clear. You're always coming back to your core argument and it really helps you to figure out — is this bit of data relevant or not because inevitably you end up with too much and you have to be ruthless. 

15:55: Rachel Briggs: You know in anything I write, whether it's a 500 word blog post or a 20,000 word report it has to be focused on what can the reader go and do differently in the office tomorrow.

21:11: Marisa Randazzo: Within security, practitioners are often trying to talk with departments outside of security — whether it is to brief a c-suite on security issues or talk with human resources or an employee assistance program — oftentimes they speak different languages and a researcher within the violence risk assessment field has talked about this great term of boundary spanner. Someone who speaks different kinds of languages in different sectors so you can communicate clearly across different domains.

26:08: Rachel Briggs: I had the pleasure of working with ASIS International and its foundation. I spent about nine months diving into the issue of diversity equity and inclusion within corporate security and - spoiler alert- there isn't as much diversity as there should be. Perhaps we didn't need a piece of research to tell us that but more importantly, what I wanted to do was get under the skin of that and really understand what’s happening. 

I interviewed 16 chief security officers and I think without exception all of them got why security and diversity were important. One of the responses that really gave me hope was when we asked for people to tell us from strongly agree to strongly disagree whether they would speak up if they saw something that wasn't right (some discriminatory behavior) and the vast majority of respondents — across all groups men women straight gay disabled non-disabled etc — said they absolutely would speak up.

In other words and I thought that was really important because essentially what we're talking about in terms of diversity is a change management challenge. We're trying to take an industry from being from looking and sounding one way to looking and sounding different in some ways and change happens first because there's the firebrands who are on the frontline who are fighting and shouting and um. You know often feel like they're sort of shouting into an empty room in those early years but answers like that that say people are willing to speak up tells me that things are changing now are they changing fast enough. 

Scott Stewart, Vice President of Intelligence at TorchStone Global, shares his expertise on this topic and how his firm provides advice to corporations on how to best protect themselves and their employees in this environment. While not all activity poses a threat, it’s important for companies to be hyper-aware of activity and the measures activists can take. Before joining TorchStone Global as the Vice President of Intelligence, Stewart led the global analysis of terrorism and security topics at Stratfor and served as a member of Michael Dell’s executive protection team. Stewart also spent ten years as a special agent with the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS). 

Key topics of Stewart’s discussion with host Fred Burton include:

• How the Extinction Rebellion movement evolved over time and why companies outside of the energy industry should be concerned.
• Advice for corporations or those managing large-scale events when there is potential for protest activity nearby.
• The impact of this type of protest on executive security outside of the office (residential security, banks supporting industries in the spotlight, sporting venues, etc.)

Thor is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of now twenty-three thrillers. He has appeared on FOX News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, and many other media outlets to discuss terrorism and current events. Thor was recruited into the Department of Homeland Security’s “Red Cell” program: an elite group of writers and artists commissioned to brainstorm terrorist scenarios for the U.S. government.

Thor returns to the podcast to discuss:

• Why Dead Fall is arguably the most intense thriller he has written.
• His approach to writing each novel (you’ll learn what the term ‘pantser’ means.)
• The top three authors who have inspired him most and the best advice he’s received.

Dead Fall was released on July 25, 2023, and can be found here.

Jack joins host Chuck Randolph to discuss:

• How his time in the Marines has influenced his leadership style.
• The evolution in training for crisis response in high-risk environments.
• How to understand the needs of the customer or protectee and build a strategy around it.
• The best ways to add value in a crisis (hint: it’s not a knee-jerk reaction).

Key takeaways:

[12:29] Jack Stradley: The main thing I realized when I was COO of an organization was that security has so many different definitions. I worked with a company that did strictly bomb blast mitigation on buildings and then I had a bunch of EP guys that ran around with surveillance kits who thought about motorcade tactics — and those two people never talked to each other. One of the things the Marine Corps taught me was the “combined arms team.” You know that you don't fight in a silo — you bring your artillery, logistics, and your air power and you all work seamlessly together.

[14:01] Jack Stradley: Today there are tremendously talented people with skills who apply those skills to do security or protection or analysis. Is really kind of easy. It's bringing all the pieces together and then showing value — making people understand the value because security for security's sake is not necessarily valuable. Security is when you can quantify or articulate its value.

[14:50] Jack Stradley: It’s important to remember the risk and the reward for what you're doing and there are no perfect solutions. You know you can't live inside Fort Knox and never leave. That's not a realistic approach so there are always trade-offs. There's always a risk tolerance that has to be understood. That's the ongoing struggle because risk tolerance for each one of us is different. 

[24:35] Chuck: You're involved when many things go south for organizations. How do you help organizations or what's your recommendation for maintaining a presence of mind? 

[25:23] Jack Stradley: I think that most people react in a crisis and that's the last thing you want to do. You want to take a beat — now that beat can be a microsecond but you take a beat and you evaluate. You look, you listen, you think, then you act — act deliberately, don't react.

Before you have to commit to a course of action and you should take as long as you have but no longer to evaluate things and then make a conscious decision and then continue to evaluate because if it's not working it's maybe time to change course.

[31:10] Jack Stradley: We are inundated with information and that's not a revelation to anyone out there. The hard part is to just you know, be able to see through the noise in the chatter and try and get to the fundamentals in the foundation. Understand — what does this mean to me and how does this affect me and my plans? That's part of what we try to do for people is help them with that.